Best back up software recommendations and elicense insurance

Steinberg Lounge
#1

I’ve put this off long enough,that I need to start some routine back up system. I have a lot of Steiny products, C7.5, Wavelab 8, etc,as well as NI and other plug-ins. Everything is spread out from the C drive to a couple of other internal drives. Oh, I’m running Win7 all 64bit.

Is mirroring the way to go, since I have no idea where all relevant files are located?

Should I buy a seperate external USB drive with enough capacity to capture the back up data?

In the event of the ultimate crash - computer dies - will the software be beneficial in setting up everything (oh, the horror!) on a new computer?

So what backup programs do you guys use and how do you use it effectively?

And the last item I read somewhere we can get insurance for our elicense dongle. Anyone know anything about this?

#2

I use Acronis plus which is also a migration software but it’s the best you can get for cloning as well.
Before every dodgy Steinberg update i always clone to my spare SSD driver which is the same size as the OS drive just in case Steinberg has caused a right royal fuck up .
Acronis is not cheap with the plus version , it works out about £80 but you never have to reinstall another program in your life :wink:

#3

Another vote for Acronis. Works as advertised and a life saver when things go wrong. There are a few other free BU softwares that I’ve tried out and they did work but I’ll stick to Acronis since I am familiar with it.

Also, if you have a Seagate HD in your computer, you can download DiscWizard from their website. It’s basically a stripped down version of Acronis but it does the job. Same goes for Western Digital. I also have another stripped down version of Acronis True Image that came with an OCZ SSD. BTW, the OCZ turned out to be a nightmare so that was replaced by a Samsung 840 Pro series SSD which works flawless in my system.

#4

Thank you for the replies! Does anyone have any comments regarding the procedural questions I asked about. Or does Acronis automatically cover my concerns?

#5

Hi electrow,

You’re welcome. I find Acronis very easy to work with. The Disk or Partition Backup and Recover settings are explained well in their manual. Of course you can’t backup your C Partition to itself. Besides my SSD (“C”) I have two more Sata III internal harddisks (“D” and “E”) and an external one (“G”) connected through USB.

My backups of C (only Windows and Program Files) and D (Audio files) go to E (where my Samples data resides) and to G (backup disk only). I also copy to content of E to G for safety. And I upload the most important stuff to an online Cloud server, just to be sure.

I also make sure I back up C everytime I install something new e.g. Windows update, new programs (incl.updates) etc. So, my first BU was a clean Windows 7 installation without programs. The next one after I installed certain programs and so on.

HTH.

#6

Everyone has a different way of working, I have :
C drive (ssd) for the OS and installed programs
D drive (hdd) for projects
E drive (hdd) for sample libraries
F drive (hdd) back up of D+E drives
G drive (usb3) program downloads and storage .

C drive is cloned to the last stable version of Cubase with all the other utilities on the exact same make and size drive as C drive and then that way if anything goes wrong i just swap drives and re-clone back to the bad drive from the spare drive , job done , no more installing programs :wink:

#7

You guys are making feel MUCH better about going almost totally to a software music system!

Let me know if my backup plan isn’t feasible:

I plan to buy the Acronis True Image Premium - right choice?

I’ll get an 2 or 3TB USB Drive for back up only.

Then I’ll Image my three Internal drives to the back up drive.

From then on do, routinely, and as necessary incremental back ups. The only thing I wasn’t sure about from reading about the software is, whether there is any compression going on. Or is the imaging & backups a one byte for one byte thing?

#8

+1 for acronis. as for type of backup, there’s all the variants there are-- file backup, sector-by-sector; full, incremental, the lot.

as far as the external backup drives are concerned, this day and age you may want go for a NAS system rather than a USB drive.

#9

Are you going to back up or clone ?
If your going to clone then there is no compression ,it’s like for like , but if your going to backup then yes i think they work out about 5gb a drive storage on the new drive .
I would clone your OS and then the others you can just copy and paste your libraries across :wink:

#10

Well, I think I want to do both? I mean what is the best way to keep data up to date in case of either:

The OS becomes corrupted, virus or whatever and I have to reinstall a pervious backup

or

The computer dies & I have to install everything on a new PC…

Years ago when I tried being diligent about backing up, I never found a software system which truly “restored” all my files. Always ended up reinstalling every program… you know how that goes.